XIII
COLORED GAMBLERS
In South State street, in blocks near 35th street, there are colored men who stand on the sidewalk and pick out faces from the human stream flowing by. They saunter carelessly out and meet these faces and speak words addressed to the ears adjusted behind the faces. These words usually are: "Try your wrist to-day? Try your wrist?"
The immemorial game of craps calls for wrist play. Of course. It is entirely a matter of luck or fate, unless the dice are loaded, but the sidewalk cappers in South State street assume that it takes a skill of the human wrist to throw the requisite sevens and elevens that are necessary to what is technically known as a "killing." So they ask, "Try your wrist?"
"Billy" Lewis for months has been running a place between 3510 and 3512 South State street, called the Pioneer club, where craps and poker are the attractions. The entrance is between two store buildings. A capper is usually in front day and night. From early in the afternoon till far in the morning players dribble in and out of this passageway, usually one customer at a time, occasionally two or three customers together, but generally everything looking quiet and orderly, though the attendance of the Pioneer club in the rear goes as high as seventy-five and 100 men when the "going" is good.
This is not the only craps and poker enterprise conducted by "Billy" Lewis. He has another at 14 East 35th street, where the second and third floors are used as a temple of the gods of chance. Also he has another at 37 West 22d street.
"Louie Joe" presides over craps at a place in the 3000 block on South State street, second floor front. "Mexican Frank" has his establishment at 3436 South State street, second floor front. "Wiley" Coleman is in the same block on South State street, second floor front.
It should be stated here that in most cases the neighboring shops, stores and flat dwellers do not enjoy the proximity of the poker and craps enthusiasts. In every instance where inquiry was made the neighbors said they wished the police would stop the games.
W. M. Bass has been operating craps and poker games night and day in the rear of a real estate ofllice on East 31st street, near Cottage Grove avenue. From an alley entrance at 3512 South State street, one may enter a temple of chance conducted by one McFallin. Two men known as "Williams" and "Kennedy" maintain a laboratory for the study oF the laws of chance on South State street, near 35th street, entrances front and rear. T. Jones has a similar laboratory on South State street, near 39th street, second floor, front and rear entrances.
"From 22d street to 39th street on South State street there is some kind of a game going here and there, usually craps and poker, and often day and night," said an informant who knows the district from constant residence in it and wide acquaintance.
"I'm no reformer," he commented further, "I don't want to have the duty of changing what is in men's natures. But you can take it from me, they're going too far out here now. There ain't many places where the game is square. The worklngman who falls for a capper and thinks he is going to try his wrist, he don't try his wrist at all. He goes up against dice that are fixed and cards that are marked and they take his money away from him."
Now for the contrast. Take a look at the buildings where live some of the victims of the gamblers, who are naturally also the victims of the police who let the gamblers run the kind of games that are run.
A house to house canvass was made by a colored newspaper man of two blocks of residences or tenements in Dearborn street adjacent to the South State street craps and poker games. The figures jotted down in the notebook of this investigator have a special significance when it is recalled that it is from these tenements that the gambling houses get part of their customers.
Within two blocks were found a total of eighty-three families where 96 per cent of the boys were truants from the public schools, and 72 per cent of these boys were retarded at least one year by reason of truancy. In most cases the parents were away from home so much that they were out of touch with the children. At sixtytwo homes the condition of furniture, walls and ceilings was classified as "dilapidated." In five instances there was water dripping into a living room from a toilet room in bad order on a floor above.
In thirty-one cases the father had "deserted," which means he is tired, dead, sick or gone wrong from unknown causes. In nineteen cases the father of the family was dead, and the mother was struggling with a variously sized brood of young ones. In twenty-eight cases the father was a heavy drinker. Three of the fathers were in jail and eleven homes were motherless. Forty mothers worked all day, twenty mothers were "heavy drinkers," to use the classification employed by this investigator. Forty-two refused to answer questions.
The following sweeping summary was noted:
"Fifty-one per cent of the cases revealed home broken by death, desertion, divorce, drink, promiscuous living or degeneracy, and cases where the deserted mother was found living in open shame before her children or where a father who is a widower was living in open shame before his children."
Such are fragmentary notes of a district in which a Chicagoan might pick up as many "Broken Blossoms" as Thomas Burke found in one quarter of London.
At the corner of 34th and South State streets the Rev. W. C. Thompson of the Pentecostal Church of Christ ended a street meeting that was rich and vibrant with melody. He explained that the police sometimes run him and his singers off the street, but the meetings would be kept up until the next time the police took such action.
"New things is comin' altogether diverse from what they has been," said this preacher in a rush of eloquence, and twenty voices of men and women shook out irresistible and magnetic melody to a song called "After a While." The last stanza ran like this:
"Our boasted land and nation is plunging in disgrace
With pictures of starvation in almost every place,
While plenty of needed money remains in horrid piles,
But God's going to rule this nation after a while.
After a while,
After a while,
God's going to rule this nation, after a while."